No one in the Adams County jail apparently knew that inmate Michael Stutsman was suicidal.
Other inmates said he hadn’t seemed depressed, hadn’t made any enemies or expressed suicidal thoughts during a mental health assessment when he was booked.
If he had been a risk, he would have been placed in a special unit where he would have been monitored around the clock.
But Stutsman avoided all of that. The 45-year-old, who had served several years in prison, had violated his parole and was expected to return to prison.
It apparently was too much. Less than a month after being booked into jail, he hanged himself with a bed sheet in the jail’s shower.
In his cell, officials found suicide notes, including one to his father in which he apologized for being “such a screw-up.” In a phone call to his father on the morning he died, he sobbed and apologized.
Stutsman is one of three suicides in the Adams County jail this year — the eighth suicide over the past six years. The jail’s rate is nearly triple the national rate.
The jail has a problem. But so does the entire system in the United States. Nationally, the number of suicides has been increasing over the years, a scenario that is grimly playing out in the Denver metro area as well.
from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed suicide has been the leading cause of death in the nation’s jails every year since 2000. The rate increased to 46 per 100,000 inmates in 2013, up from 40 in 2012.
Adams County’s rate over a six-year span is a whopping 125 suicides per 100,000 inmates. The formula used to determine the rate considers the number of suicides in a jail, the facility’s average daily population, and extrapolates that to 100,000 inmates.
Adams County Sheriff Michael McIntosh says his office is taking the problem seriously.
“Adams County recognizes the growing mental health issues in our jails and prisons,” he said in a letter to The Denver Post. “Our jail is experiencing the same growing population of severe mental health and dual diagnosis clients as other jails across the country.”
Of course, the problem isn’t just in Adams County. Suicides have been occurring in other Denver metro area jails.
Arapahoe County, Jefferson County and Denver jails each have recorded four suicides in the past five years — but their rates vary because of their jail populations.
Under the formula, Arapahoe County — with an estimated average population of 1,087 inmates — has a rate of 61 suicides per 100,000 inmates. Jefferson County — with an average 1,337 inmates a day — had a rate of 50 suicides per 100,000.
Denver, with the largest average daily population of 2,000 inmates, had a rate of about 33 suicides per 100,000 inmates.
It is unknown whether the number of suicides in Adams County is due to a more systematic problem. Sheriff McIntosh disagrees with that conclusion and defended his office in reaction to a .
“To suggest the sheriff’s office is not concerned with deaths in our detention facility, or that we do not have a suicide prevention program that is frequently updated, is offensive to every man and women who have sworn to protect our community.”
Moreover, McIntosh offered a detailed description of the program, including how the jail follows nationally accredited standards in suicide prevention.
The county contracts with locally owned Community Reach Center for inmate mental health care and has spent nearly $30 million since 2010 to contract with Corizon Correctional Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit jail health care service.
However, a recent article in magazine revealed Corizon has had several “high-profile setbacks,” losing five contracts with state prisons over the past three years. It has been accused in lawsuits and news stories of quality problems.
McIntosh to questions about how the Adams County Sheriff’s Office screens inmates, provides suicide-prevention training for deputies, and keeps watch over potentially suicidal inmates.
McIntosh said suicide-awareness posters are plastered throughout the jail, prevention videos are played on every inmate’s TV throughout the morning, and at-risk inmates are housed in a medical unit that is under 24-hour camera surveillance and where inmates are checked every 15 minutes.
A standing county committee also meets regularly to work on ways to improve the jail’s mental health system. Since 2014, the sheriff’s office has had a budget request to remodel part of the jail to accommodate the “special needs and services of a dedicated mental health unit.” The current pending request is for $3.2 million.
and another inmate’s death, McIntosh told The Post, “If someone is determined to take their own life, when they get to that point, then they are going to do whatever it is that they need to do.”
McIntosh is correct. It is impossible to foresee every suicide — as the death of Michael Stutsman on April 8 shows. However, the day before Stutsman killed himself, he was served papers notifying him that he would be sent back to prison.
Analysis of any suicide can expose moments when intervention might have stopped the act. A key to prevention, according to a , is to get everyone in the jail system aware of those signs and a system in place to report suspicions. Staff should have conversations with inmates around court hearings or other critical periods to identify feelings of hopelessness or suicidal intent, the report says.
Preventive measures that have become standard practice in many jails over the past 40 years have resulted in a dramatic drop in the suicide rate, which used to hover around 107 suicides per 100,000 inmates.
Adams County clearly has a problem. Thankfully, it appears the sheriff isn’t ignoring it.
E-mail Jeremy Meyer at jpmeyer@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jpmeyerdpost
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